A Privacy-Respecting Family Photo and Video Backup Service Hosted by a Social Enterprise
In this thread:
https://trisquel.info/en/forum/guix-free-software-distribution
Calher said:
> Most of my childhood photos have been lost due to poor system administration by parents and my inexperienced self.
I agree this is a troubling and probably common situation. I have thought for a long time there is a potentially a social enterprise business opportunity in a privacy-respecting and freedom-respecting service that helped people to preserve and manage their digital family and photos and videos.
Another option is to create a fork of SyncThing for the purpose, with a UI optimized for helping families (and other groups of people) maintain well-sorted shared folders of photos, videos, and other data they wish to hold collectively. The problem with this is that it presumes they have sufficient space on their internal storage to hold not only their own lifetime worth of photos/ videos but their entire family/ group collection. USB hard drives are, in my experience, not reliable, although perhaps the SSD ones might be better.
Even this may be too complicated for many users. Plus, it's no help to those families who mainly own mobile devices, and may have only own one or two desktop or laptop computers between them, or none at all. I think reliable archiving of family photos/ videos is something valuable enough to people that they would be willing to pay an ongoing subscription for it. Using free code software and a small team of sysadmins, UX designers, and customer communications, the costs could probably be kept fairly low, ideally something low enough that any family group could easily afford.
There is Piwigo: https://piwigo.org/what-is-piwigo
I am a member!
On 12/17/2019 11:55 AM, name at domain wrote:
> There is Piwigo: https://piwigo.org/what-is-piwigo
Interesting. Don't know how I'd try it out.
It's in F-Droid too
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.piwigo.android/
But they don't say so in their download page
Contrast this with Librem One
Which at the top of its homepage not only prominently shows a link to F-Droid right along with Google and Apple, but also to its own PureOS Store that doesn't even exist yet. I'll say this for Purism - they understand branding and marketing, and on the importance of legitimizing and normalizing FLOSS.
Thanks for the link to Piwigo MagicBanana, the Piwigo.com service is the closest thing I've seen so far to what I described in the OP, but ...
Look at the pricing model for the hosted service:
https://piwigo.com/pricing
Their "enterprise" plans are 45-250 Euros a month, far beyond the budget of all but the most wealthy families.
They have "individual" plans for 39-99 Euros a year, which have unlimited storage, but they appear to be single-user, so not really fulfilling the need I outlined in the OP. I guess you could use USBs to transfer new photos to one family member who has a desktop or laptop (or use SyncThing to send them), and have them do the uploading to Piwigo. But that's an ugly hack, lacking the convenience that makes nonfree services like Dropbox attractive. Also, it may violate the spirit of that pricing plan, if not the letter of the contract it involves. Plus, "individual" plans are for image files only (no home videos).
I am a member!
Ideally, FreedomBox would have a service for this. People would install
a server in the home similar to an answering machine, and it would Just
Work if you followed the setup instructions. (Get this much space, etc.)
Calher:
> Ideally, FreedomBox would have a service for this. People would install
a server in the home
I like the concept, but I can see two problems with this.
The first is the storage requirements. An extended family group of 10-20 people can easily create 100s of GB worth of photos and home video over the years. Even if they ruthlessly delete all but the "good" ones, they are going to want to store those at maximum quality, and I presume that as the quality of the average digital camera improves, that size for the same number of photos (or minutes of video) will also continue to increase. What happens when the storage device attached to the FreedomBox runs out of room, who pays for a larger one? If it's an internal drive, who does the work to obtain and install it? What if nobody in the family is a geek with time to tinker? If it's an external USB drive, and easier to replace, what if it gets nudged by the dog and dies, as they tend to do with the smallest provocation?
The second set of problems is logistical. Who administrates the FreedomBox? whose home does it live in, using their electricity and net connection? What if everyone in the family only has mobile data and/or dial-up internet? How are the costs (in both cash/money and admin time) shared?
I have seriously considered setting up some kind of server-in-the-closet for my family, and I've had to grapple with all of these questions. I'm the only one in the family with (some of) the skills and the interest in administrating such a server, but I am also the most nomadic. Normally I live in China. If I set up a server there, I may have trouble with the Great Firewall and may not be able to bring it back with me (unless it's physically very small, including storage). If the server is kept in another family member's home, I need to be able to access it, if it has a problem that can't be fixed via remote access, but we live in different countries.
My family are mostly lower middle class. Some of us are professionals, some own property, and most of us have a bit of disposable income. We have had computers in our lives since the 1980s and most of us have at least a basic technical literacy. Many families would struggle even more with the questions above than us, either because they lack housing security and/or spare cash for hardware purchases, or because they lack the technical understanding to even conceptualize the server-in-a-closet approach.
It's precisely because I hit a brick wall with the server-in-a-closet approach, despite the advantages my family have, that I'm envisioning an online service. One with a UX designed specifically around families (not atomized individuals or formal organizations) and priced at a level any family with a set of mobile devices among them can afford.
I am a member!
Good point. I hadn't thought of it that way. I was only thinking of it
in terms of "Cloud storage is bad. Everyone needs to buy as many hard
drives as they can, for backup."
--
Caleb Herbert
KE0VVT
(816) 892-9669
https://bluehome.net/csh
The problem with the "cloud" is the extractive corporations using servers to take freedoms away from users. There are plenty of situations in which a shared remote computer (ie a server) makes more sense than a local computer - especially given the state of existing software - and plenty of situations where it makes sense to use both in tandem. This definitely seems to be one of them :)
Anybody tried piwigo?
I am also searching for a reliable way of storing photos and videos (thinking about nextcloud or just plain old Samba server).
Shotwell and digiKam (both in Trisquel's repository) can export to Piwigo. You can use one of those applications to manage your photos (that I would keep on a local hard drive anyway!) and see the result of an export to Piwigo with this demo: https://piwigo.org/demo/
As far as I can see, the photos are not stored encrypted. That is feature (I think) I would like.
Absolutely, a service for remote storage of family photos and home videos needs to be E2EE, to increase the protection of family privacy.